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Account Based Selling Best Practices: A Framework For SDRs

The role of the SDR has changed and evolved significantly. The method of dialing 100-200 calls a day is simply outdated. We avoid “spray and pray” tactics, in favor of a personalized outreach approach to our Ideal Customer Profiles (ICP). You all may have heard of Account Based Marketing, Account Based Intelligence and Account Based Everything. However, today I will be talking about Account Based Selling.

Identifying your Customer Profile

First, the most crucial aspect in your account based sales process is identifying your ICP:

Which key stakeholders are you looking to get in front of?

Which accounts are you trying to get your message to?

What industry is the best fit for your solution?

Figuring out the answers to those questions helps with the identification process. When I first got into my SDR role, I looked at our customer list to figure out who we were targeting and what companies we were looking to get in front of.

Furthermore, I had meetings with the CEO, the CMO, and also the sales leadership team to ask them questions about the ICPs. I tried to figure out what we are targeting andhow are we getting in front of them.

That’s the first step in account based selling: understanding the buyers and what industries they are in.

Targeting the Right Stakeholders

Once you have identified the best-fit accounts, the next step is to target the key stakeholders you want to reach.

You need to get in front of those people on a daily basis. How do I apply this? Its simple – when I go in front of a company, I know exactly who I’m targeting.

I’m not looking at the VP of finance; I’m not looking at the engineering team; I’m not looking at customer success. I’m looking at specific marketers. When you’re going into account-based selling, you’re looking at the overall account, not just this one person and treating them as a lead.

According to Gartner research:

In a typical firm with 100-500 employees, an average of 7 people are involved in most buying decisions.

Therefore, it’s super important to make sure you’re touching those key people that would make the decision. Don’t get caught up with just focusing on one person.

Tailoring the Right Message

For example, if you’re reaching out to a demand generation manager within the tech software industry, you need to understand what their pain points are. A generic message is going to get ignored because they are already receiving tons of those.

I went to Sirius Decisions this year and asked a lot of marketers how many solicitation emails they receive a day. They told me they receive between 100 to 200 emails a day.

Here’s exactly why you will fail:

Your message isn’t tailored to what they need.

If you didn’t properly align your value prop to their exact pain points.

KEEP DIALING!

About the author

Morgan is a Sales Development Representative (SDR) and Team Lead at Terminus, which helps B2B Marketers do Account-Based Marketing at scale. He is the host of The SDR Chronicles, which is a YouTube channel specifically geared for SDRs that provides motivation, advice and tactics. You can follow him @morganjingram on Twitter.